Romance Defects
Diplomacy’s a wash. Give the Gideon a giddyup. Switch plates. Switch teams. Replenish cavities with Morse Code. Tremble near me. I am glistening. Speak truth. Report the cortex jimmied as a lock.
One temple or two, one template or too much grasp. I told you I would love you without words. I gave my word, and that was Thames speed toward the muck left holding truck tires. Lemme see, I think we once were twinned tucks lemon lines away from sweet. You took my face into your sense of hearing plot go dark. Sparse winter formed a glaze across the upstart blazes.
Now I lay me dormant as a spot. The clock taps shoulder length and hairlines fracture plot. I think the story was a maze, and you, my inkblot, told the tale of me toute seule where I would whisper your soft name, the frame of it, the hemline brushing tile.
Remember who my heart has been named after and allow me place cards to remove the absence. Should be is a form of petrified endorsement. Flame on framework, overtime to rights. I take my game plan home with me at night.
You have disturbed what you disrobed by heart. I limit glad. You mood me. You awaken practice like a music stand. I hear the metronome of you come hither and the wash of seas. I want to arms control your depth. You wheel the ferris into scrap. You capstone my amenities. You wrap your heart around my hope. I leap apart from years.
And years go by. They write their tickets hiero-fare. They boast. We’re toast. We know more than we scope out of the weeds these rumored flowers feased and creased. The moment I adopt your sight, I am in line. The moment I apres-midi your victuals, we can safety priest our home. It is a combed unlikely sourdough. It is a roast. I want your down low to be host.
Permission to Relax
Personality outlasts summer. Do I have to be an age, she asks? Strapped in the yard of confluence, the players all wore pinstripe. Did you ever think you’d be the one accused? Trap door, listless the wind, conforms to brave new moray skin. Play me a nocturne. Cry the night young. You, a funster, work your way down seasonal array. Per usual, you are now free to move about the treasure trove of keepsakes. In perpetuity, declares the oligarch. Go shop. Full stop.
The perfidy of the select few de-perfumes our midst. Just when we thought safety, sacrilege prevails, the statement, “As you were” had legs. Now integers grow solid as surround-toned weeds. Places to ride and features to brim over western skies.
Wherefore art thou, balderdash, unappetizing rinse? The scullery maid readied definite articles for in-definition. All the views unfit to sprint. Earned miles trapeze your learning curve. Too steep for kismet. The parlay can begin.
Sandy head meets burly rose. Stippled shape of surface as the high road turns to low. I think you may recuse yourself until high priests give way to stickball. If and only if our servitude arrives, Rambo sans Rimbaud, all across the glimmer of a strum.
Permission to relax, Your Eminence? I see thinly through the slats across our windows and their undertones. Pertaining to the maximum security we hasten to protect. Why fear setting the table? Per omnia saecula saeculorum.
Dramatis personae come to grips with error-free entonces. It’s raining flower-free immersion. And the litmus test imagined has reshaped the town.
Tame as Brother Love Is Powerful
World peace, supposed an oxymoron, blithely slips out of the voice boxes of children treated to a platter of young tangelos. I told my protégé that I was younger than the work.
We practice failure to harmonize, endorse each other for mutual wit. To wit, the priest, his ribaldry, the diamond chokers, worn while watching football with an honest man. They read their lines.
The confessional once bloated is still full of breath. I take my temperature and call it in to doctors from another land. She taught me all I know I lost. Each morning I endure a row of after-dinner mints while I read Horace, Heraclitus, the young Proust. Let us be thankful for our neighborly afflictions. Let us crispen pathways to the premised lab. Let us revoke irrevocable trysts.
Your Latin roots are lagging left, plans to promenade had been concealed before I canceled thought. Tonight I see the child, long years into reflection, telling me my bicycle runs sweetly as a butterfly planes over Halifax. These empty clothes constrain me. I contain myself.
Virtue is the place between us chaperoned by genuflection and pure fate. I resurrect what legacy we piece together. And we vault over the obstacles due left of any home town scoped for stretch goals not yet stretched.
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Sheila E. Murphy is an American poet who has been actively writing and publishing since 1978. In 2018, her book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.) and xPress(ed) (Finland). Also in 2018, Broken Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from the Ivory. Luna Bisonte Prods released Underscore—a visual book in collaboration with K.S. Ernst—in that same year. Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). She earns her living as a professor, organizational consultant, speaker, and researcher and holds the PhD degree. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.